I saw this in Twitter, and it has been posted on Paid Content with a brief commentary:

“Cory Ondrejka twiittered late this afternoon that he is leaving: “Thanks EMI for great year and a half, time to return to entrepreneurial roots, last day 21 Aug.” The timing is odd to say the least. Ondrejka only recently became the top digital exec at EMI, EVP of digital marketing, where the current strategy—or at least, the talk—is all about mainstreaming digital. He was promoted in March when his boss, former Google (NSDQ: GOOG) CIO Douglas Merrill, was organized out. Just a couple of weeks ago, he and EMI announced eight hires and promotions in digital marketing.”

Will be interesting to see what emerges as far as reasons.

Cory, who was instrumental in building Second Life, left under, um, prompting from Philip Rosedale. In fact, his employment was terminated by e-mail as I previously reported.

Cory blogged the following, in a broader post about the Obama campaign:

“I didn’t end up involved with the (Obama) campaign to any degree. Sure, I blogged about it and donated, but mostly I was working. I was asked to sign on to Obama’s tech policy when it was released last November and would have, except that the final version hit my inbox a few minutes ahead of Philip’s email informing me that he wanted me to leave Linden. Unfortunate timing, that.”

Hopefully we’ll see Cory circle back to virtual worlds somehow. And I also hope that EMI didn’t send him his notice via Twitter.